A friend of mine is worried that changing the font of the <h1> tag will cause Google to penalize it (or not assign as much weight to it). He described a situation where small <h1> text could be used to fake the important keywords on a page. I assured him that this was silly, but he insists on hard reference. Could anyone link me to something written by Google?

I don't think this is a duplicate, the question is about changing the font style.
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martinstoeckliMay 29 '12 at 20:06

situation where small H1 text could be used to fake the important keywords on a page If we're talking about tiny, unreadable text positioned outside the visible view window for keyword stuffing purposes, yes you will be penalized. If it's font/size change as design element on a human readable keyword rich heading, Google doesn't care.
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Fiasco LabsMay 29 '12 at 20:18

@FiascoLabs if you read the answers you'll find all the answers to the question in there.
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toomanyairmilesMay 29 '12 at 22:08

2 Answers
2

Of course a header in another font face or size has no less weight. What your friend was describing is that Google will sort out headings, which try to get a better rank for keywords, that are not actually visible to the user.

That means, Google will penalize pages that try to show different content to search engines as to the user. A font size of 1px is only one possibility, you could as well use a black font on a black background. If your page changes the font, but remains visible to the user, that should be no problem.

Edit:

I missed the point of providing a link to a Google article, so the article Hidden text and links of the Google Webmasters page should be helpful I think.

Google spiders aren't looking in your CSS files to find out whether you've changed your paragraph tag typeface from Arial to Courier; they're too busy sifting through markup to get at those keywords in the content.